Secrets of Morocco:Eldritch Explorations in the Ancient Kingdom
Published by Chaosium
Written by William Jones
Cover art by Malcolm McClinton
124-page b&w perfect bound softback
$20.95

Morocco isn't the first place you would think of to set a Call of
Cthulhu game. Sure, it has a lot going for it as a setting for eldritch
horror - varied terrain, including dangerous mountains and deserts, a
long and war-torn history, and plenty of opportunities for culture shock
and clash. It's just not on most people's radar screens; generally,
having heard of Casablanca is the extent of most people's Moroccan
knowledge. I have to confess to being among the ignorant masses, so I
looked forward to learning a great deal while reading Secrets of
Morocco. Sadly, in this and all other regards, I was disappointed.

In a Strange LandSecrets of Morocco is an expansion of Mysteries of Morocco, part of
Chaosium's limited-distribution "Monographs" series. Despite being an
expanded edition, there just isn't a lot here. A great deal of content
is filler - the text is larger than usual, and there are quite a few
large, uninteresting illustrations and gratuitous sidebars wasting
valuable space. Chapters that should be providing crucial Moroccan
background information waste inordinate amounts of space describing
bland NPCs that Keepers could develop better on their own, or introducing
pointless new rules. Do we really need a page and a half devoted to
game mechanics for getting drunk? Is a single page of random French and
Arabic phrases really going to help anyone? Is there any reason to have
eight pages of duplicated player handouts?

Besides being padded, the book suffers from major organizational
problems. What little useful factual information is provided is often
repeated in multiple places in the book or trails off before conveying
enough detail to be of practical use in gameplay. You get to read about
the details of the Treaty of Fez at least twice (nearly a hundred pages
apart), but coverage of important historical figures generally limits
itself to lists of names. The book repeatedly suggests that cultural
misunderstandings and language differences can make for good
role-playing, but it gives only a few fairly obvious examples of
important cultural issues. Scenario-specific information is inserted
throughout the book, cluttering things up and making it harder to find
general information. There is no index or glossary, so when the book
drops a vaguely familiar-sounding name, there is no easy way to figure
out who or what it is talking about. Perhaps worst of all, unlike the
other Secrets books I have read [see the Related reviews, below], there is no bibliography to help
Keepers track down the information that is so clearly missing from this
book. Seems like the author should have spent a bit more time on
research....

Of course, organizational issues and spotty factual detail could be
forgiven if there was good game material here. Unfortunately, there
isn't. For having such an exotic setting, the book is stunningly
unoriginal. Besides the previously-mentioned bland NPCs, we also have
bland Mythos artifacts (A chest with a demon in it? A rare book about
cults?), bland new rules (Developing second sight? Becoming immortal?)
and bland scenarios. The first scenario has the players opposing a mad
cultist trying to summon a Great Old One (no, really?), and takes place
over a broad enough time scale that it really would better serve as a
meta-narrative around a group of shorter, more focused adventures - too
bad there's not enough material here to come up with any. The second
scenario basically amounts to a dungeon crawl... and not an interesting
one. There's also a mini-scenario involving an encounter with a monster
during a strange desert phenomenon that resembles a rain of blood -
probably one of the book's best efforts at making use of the unique
setting, but far too little to make up for all the mediocrity around it.

Conclusions
Chaosium doesn't usually disappoint me, but this book is nothing
but a disappointment. It takes a potentially interesting topic, fails
to examine it with any level of meaningful detail, then buries its
half-hearted efforts in filler and mediocrity. There is no reason to
waste your time on this book; if you want to run a game in Morocco, find
a couple of general reference books and make up the Mythos stuff
yourself. There's nothing in this book that your own imagination can't
do better.